


Prince of Gotham

by snackbaskets



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics), Under the Red Hood
Genre: Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Fluff and Angst, Gen, God Bless Alfred Pennyworth, Hurt/Comfort, Jason Todd-centric, Latino Jason Todd, Protective Jason Todd, Trans Character, Trans Jason Todd, and respecting women, i love unnecessarily wack and poetic writing styles, its about trans jason, jason protects women with his LIFE, literally almost 3k of jason having girls be nice to him and being nice to girls, no angst about being trans, thats it lads, the angst is about the Everything Else about jason lmao
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-16 19:20:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19324471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snackbaskets/pseuds/snackbaskets
Summary: Gotham wasn't kind to its girls. Jason would brutalize it until it agreed to be. He only hoped it would spare him long enough to make it so.





	Prince of Gotham

**Author's Note:**

> CRACKS MY KNUCKLES u guys should hav seen this coming 
> 
> im gonna rub my little trans mitts over EVERYTHING and god himself could not stop me 
> 
>  
> 
> very very brief use of transphobic/slur language by jay as hes coming out but bruce shuts that shit down FAST

Gotham wasn’t kind to its girls. Jason learned it quick, knew it before he knew what a girl really even was, long before he understood why perky tits and round bottoms smothered the streets; on the papers mashed into the sidewalk, on the walls of buildings, on the pretty neon signs, on the sparkling, made-up ladies who stood on the corners and purred in low voices at anyone who came close. He learned it when he saw a woman crying on the sidewalk with two other girls at her shoulders and tears in her clothes. He learned it when the pretty woman two doors down told him she’d never put her sparkling dust on his face, and that he should never touch it, himself. He learned it when Willis blacked out his mother’s left eye. 

“Mamá,” he asked, when Willis was gone and the broken plates were mostly swept up and Catherine had a fresh bag of peas pressed to her cheek, “How come daddy calls you a bitch? Qué es eso?”

“Oh, baby,” Catherine sighed. “It’s a bad word your daddy uses when he’s angry. He doesn’t mean it, sweetheart.”

“Why’s it bad? What’s it mean?”

“It’s a word people call girls sometimes, when they’re angry. It’s not nice, baby. No lo digas nunca, okay?”

“Okay, mamá.” He wiggled closer to her, laying his head on her shoulder and patting the bag on her face. “Lo prometo.”

Jason knew Gotham was bad to its girls. Knew it from the way the older kids gave their ugliest clothes to the building’s daughters, why they would take scissors to their hair, why they compared the best ways to wear their too-big shirts and thrice-rolled jeans so nobody could see their widening hips and tiny chests. He knew it when Louise from the third floor disappeared, and nobody looked. 

Catherine never said a word. She held him close and kissed his face and loved him the same as always, but Jason knew, he knew she was thankful. Thankful she didn’t have a daughter. That she didn’t need to fear reaching hands on the streets or teach him the dangers of hair left long, that she would never have to beg him not to buy those jeans, please, they’re too tight, I don’t care if the girls at school wear them, that Jason was at least a hair less likely to be bought and sold if he was just a little unlucky and unaware someday. 

Willis didn’t care. Or maybe he did, and not caring and caring looked the same, and maybe he only knew how to hit and nothing else. _You gonna be a man, you gotta act like one, Jason. Take wha’chu want, show ‘em who’s boss._ He tried it, once, to be a man like he was supposed to be, slammed his hand against a locker above Frankie Lowe’s head and boxed her in against his chest, told her to give him a kiss, baby, just a one. 

“You’re scaring me,” she said, and her big, wide eyes reminded him of his mother.

“I’m sorry,” Jason said back, and threw up in the bathroom. 

Willis got caught, and Catherine started freefalling, and Gotham kept striking at her like a viper whose venom never ran out. She worked three jobs that had her coming home with streaked makeup and shaking hands, had her loosing quiet sobs in the shower because she was _so tired, mijo, _and when the dealers came sniffing, they followed the carrion-sweet of a woman run desperate, and Catherine was so sick from work that the drugs actually helped her in the beginning, and Jason took too long to figure out their disease was twice as deadly. By that time, Catherine didn’t stand in the shower anymore, and Jason was the one to cry as he scrubbed the stench of cooking oil and cheap coffee and Gotham’s hate from her shoulders while she laid in the bath and went somewhere else.__

__Catherine died on the tile, and like Louise, nobody looked for her either._ _

__The streets were the worst-- the girls were all either owned or feral, all bared teeth and clawing nails and eyes so wild they hardly saw anymore, and the first time Jason ever took a knife to his skin was when he got too close to a young woman barely a year his senior and she struck at him like a caged animal when he tried to help her out of a puddle. For his eleventh birthday, he went dumpster diving with Liv Nickels and they found the body of a woman in a tiny purple dress. Jason held her and cried for her, and when Liv told him to stop being a little bitch about it, he cried for her, too._ _

__He popped hubcaps for money, and gave almost all of it to the working girls who couldn’t cover their pimp’s demands, because if Gotham wasn’t going to love its girls, then Jason would._ _

__When Batman picked him up by his too-big shirt and gave him paradise, he dreamt of beautiful bodies in old dumpsters and all the girls he must have let down when he left. He wondered if they’d looked for him._ _

__Robin was good. Robin helped. Robin was everything, and Robin was _Jason_ , and Bruce loved him without hitting, and he never took what he wanted from anyone, and maybe Gotham could spare one girl for one more night because Batman and Robin demanded it be so._ _

__He thought Gotham had spared him, too, and then he wasn’t starved anymore, and then they fought Poison Ivy, and then she stepped over Bruce’s unconscious body and took his face in her hands and said_ _

__“Oh, _darling_ ,” _ _

__as he doubled over in a pain he didn’t know he could have and she held him there, rubbed his back like he used to do for his mother until the burning agony in his guts stopped breaking him and Bruce took him so gently from her arms and back to the second home he’d been afraid of leaving._ _

__“He had a strange reaction to Ivy’s plants,” Bruce said, as Jason laid on a cot and fought the nausea in his stomach, “Nothing we ever saw from Dick, and I don’t know what’s causing it.”_ _

__“His tests have run clean, Master Bruce,” Alfred replied. “The chemicals have likely wreaked havoc on the poor boy’s hormones. You know how fussy Master Dick used to get when you fought her at his age. I think he just needs a good rest. He’s a growing boy, after all.”_ _

__Jason woke with the ache in his stomach and soaked sheets between his thighs, and he cried for the first time since Liv Nickels as red poured from his insides and Gotham declared him a girl, after all._ _

__“Something happened, Alfie,” he said wetly over his eggs, face hot with shame and stomach sick from the fear of what Gotham would do to him next. “Don’t tell B, please. _Please_ Alfred, don’t tell him.”_ _

__“If I told Master Bruce everything, my boy, he would have long since worn better ties.”_ _

__“I ruined-- I ruined my sheets. It’s. I’m...”_ _

__“It happens, Master Jason. Bruce did for some months after his parents passed.”_ _

__“Not like that.”_ _

__Alfred raised his eyebrows, but turned back to the skillet nonetheless._ _

__“I’ve raised two teenage boys. What’s happening is completely natural for a young man your age.”_ _

__“It’s not!” Jason roared, and his eggs spilt to the floor like the blood from his legs, and his fingertips were slick with spit and gore by the time Alfred managed to pull them from his mouth and sit him back into his chair. “Boys don’t shove toilet paper in their pants! Boys don’t grow tits and asses and wake up bleeding from their pu--”_ _

__“You’d best choose your next words very carefully, Master Jason, or I might just break the soap out for that mouth of yours.”_ _

__“Don’chu get it, Alfred? I’m not a boy, not like you ‘n B! I’m not Robin, I’m not Jason, I’m not anything! I’m just another girl for Gotham to run dry!”_ _

__It was the only time Alfred ever hit him, the palm to his cheek that it was, a loud clap in the kitchen that brought a silence broken only by the sound of bacon turning to char on the stove._ _

__“I’ll never hear you talk about yourself that way again, Master Jason, do you understand me?” he said, and the look in his eyes was the same as Ivy’s when she helped him to the ground and pulled him into her lap, smelling of roses and chlorophyll and the brutal kind of feminine that came from being one of Gotham’s feral survivors._ _

__“But--”_ _

__“You listen to me now, and I’ll say it as many times as you ask of me: you are capable, you are strong, you are most certainly grounded for your language, and you are my boy’s _son_. You are a part of this family, and you will remain as such for so long as this Earth keeps turning.”_ _

__“I don’t want this, Alfie,” he begged, as if Alfred could change the course of nature, because if anyone could, it was the old butler of Wayne Manor, and Jason had nothing left to pray to but the house-god of a breathing city that sought him emptied like all the girls before him._ _

__“Then it will be fixed,” he replied, as if Jason asking was all it took to change the fabric of reality, because if anything mattered, it was the survival of a single light in a city of dying prayers. “And fortunately, I’m quite well-versed in removing bloodstains, so if you’d please bring your bedding to the laundry room while I clean up the kitchen, I’ll show you to the menstrual products we have stashed about.”_ _

__He told Bruce three months later when he finally found where the tampons were supposed to fit and he did it wearing his warmest clothes, pockets laden with sweet things and protein bars and pill bottles and shiny silver spoons, because as much as he might have loved him, his sort-of-almost-father, the only one he’d ever had, Gotham was well versed in hatred, and Jason grew up seeing it boil in the city’s stinking bowels too many times to believe in the word unconditional._ _

__“I’ve got tits,” he said, and Bruce didn’t look up from the Batcomputer to speak to him, and Jason wondered if the man who held him through his nightmares would look him in the eyes when he expelled him from his home._ _

__“Is this more teenage slang I don’t know about, anymore?” he asked._ _

__“Sure. Slang for my name ain’t Jason, and I got a pussy, and I’m a tranny fag,” Jason replied._ _

__“If Alfred heard a word of what had just come out of your mouth, he’d feed us both soap for supper.”_ _

__“You mad?”_ _

__“Rather displeased to hear you using derogatory terms, Jay-lad, seeing as I know you’re much better than them.”_ _

__“I’m a girl, B. That don’t piss you off I been lying?”_ _

__Bruce frowned._ _

__“Would you like Alfred to collect more suitable clothes for your wardrobe?”_ _

__“No! I mean, I’m a girl, but I don’t wanna be. Never did.”_ _

__“Then from what I understand of gender theory, you’re not a girl at all. I’ll update your file to accommodate your physical needs and medical exceptions. Are you interested in medical transition therapies?”_ _

__“I. It’s that easy, for you? You don’t hate me?”_ _

Bruce rolled back from his chair, and when he held Jason’s face in his great, calloused hands, so big they felt they could cradle the universe, he did so with all the care that Catherine used to use when she did the same, and he said 

“I never meant to try and be your father, Jason. But Alfred tells me that fatherhood requires me to love you no matter what, and I’m afraid I’ve been incapable of not loving you from the moment I brought you home.” 

And Jason wept. 

Gotham spared him, let him live in its belly and crawl through its veins and pull the girls it tried to take from its bloody, crooked talons, and Jason loved every minute of it; he shotgunned the city’s smog from its gaping mouth and breathed it easier than the oxygen anywhere else, because this place had grown him in its soil and while it was never kind, Jason could beat it until it ceased to be cruel. The cold pavement and dark alleys held him close instead of swallowing him whole, and in the end, it wasn’t Gotham who cut him open and spilled his guts, but a little warehouse in a country no one thought twice about who was just as wicked to its boys as his home had ever been to its girls. 

When Jason dug himself out of his grave, he did it with the same hands that brutalized hatred into penitence, and when he woke in a soft bed, it was with the perfume-sweet-spices of a feral woman’s home in his nose. Talia was nothing like Bruce and nothing like Catherine and everything like Talia and she hit him until he hit back and never took no for an answer because Jason was incapable of saying it. She bathed him like he did his mother when his body was too broken to hold it himself and she hid him from her father like Jason did his mother from Willis’ hate-chiseled fists, and she was everything Jason might have been if he’d lived as one of Gotham’s girls instead. She beat him senseless and they were the only times he could remember feeling the heart in his chest, something, anything beyond soil under his nails and vacancy behind his eyes and loss below his sternum. 

“It is a reactionary corpse,” Ra’s said, with a sword pressed to Jason’s throat and Talia’s sword pressed to his. “It will never be human again.” 

“Wait,” Talia told him, because he had shed four tears on the clifftop of the compound last week, and she smiled with all of her too-sharp teeth and it showed him how to say I told you so in Arabic’s musical throat. 

He woke the next morning with an ache in his chest and a burn between his legs, and it wasn’t until he peeled away the fluid-damp bandages that he could remember feeling his face, crawling up to bare his gums in a threat and a promise and a full body hallelujah as he ran his dirt-caked fingertips over a newly flattened chest and howled like Lycaon below the moon. Ra’s came to look upon him as Talia stood above his kneeling form, and she cradled his head between her hands like displaying a trophy as he laughed for the first time since laughter had been spoiled for him and Ra’s never put a sword to him again. 

Talia pitched him into the Lazarus waters and Gotham called for him with its wardrum heartbeat, and Jason followed it home before he realized he could feel his feet. For months he drifted in a haze and rode the madness, rode the fury and agony and betrayal and hate hate hate, let his brother beg him and his father beat him and his city twist him into the kind of monster he’d always sought to unmake. 

He found himself on a couch that smelled like sex with a painted woman trying to crawl into his lap and it was the first memory he could recall clearly since the earth swallowed him whole. 

“Don’t you want a kiss, handsome?” she asked. “To repay you for getting rid of that awful man? Just a one, baby.” 

“I’m scaring you,” he replied, and held her hair back when she threw up instead. 

It was the first time he looked in a mirror since he breathed again when he crawled back into his hole that night, and he found his old scars unraised like they used to be but still stained white into his skin, with his chest smooth and his stomach free of aching and his scum-blacked jeans unstuffed and it occurred to him that the Pit hadn’t undone him in every way that mattered. 

He left the next night and found Tim Drake standing on a rooftop with a scar on his throat and a bo in his hand and when they heard the screams start, Jason pointed his gun at his head and said _the Narrows are mine, hermanito_ , and Tim flashed all of his teeth in a way that said he’d learned it from a feral girl, and went the other way home. 

Gotham wasn’t kind to its girls, but Alfred had told him once that a king was meant to protect and serve his people, and Willis didn’t call him a prince for nothing. 


End file.
